Drug Laws are Immoral
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By Father John Clifton Marquis, S.T.
U.S Catholic, May 1990
The United States’ federal, state, county and city governments have spent the last 50 years writing and enacting antidrug laws with increasingly severe punishments for offenders. These laws are false gods promising a salvation they cannot produce. Every year, they demand more adoration from their devotees: more time, more money, more people, more resources. And yet, no matter how punitive the sanctions (including the death penalty itself), the drug-providing business has only escalated; indeed ballooned. This is simple, historical fact.

Drug laws are a moral issue. Fifty years of drug legislation have produced the exact opposite effect of what those laws intended: the laws have created a tantalizingly profitable economic structure for marketing drugs. When law does not promote the common good, but in fact causes it to deteriorate, the law itself becomes bad and must be changed.

The undeniable result of current U.S. drug laws is certainty that drugs will be very, very expensive. The corollary to that “given” is that people will commit many and violent sins to control the money that is to be made.

The moral issue here is to do the very best that can be done to give the community maximum control over drug availability and consequent drug use. Society cannot cure every drug abuser or alcoholic; that is a given. But the community can create a social condition in which innocent people do not become victims and where health-care professionals have a better opportunity (with more funds and people available) to serve the healing process of drug abusers.

The moral principle involved here is very old and very sure: pick the lesser of two evils. Drug abuse is bad. It is a patent evil to the person abusing drugs and to everyone connected with him or her. But drug abuse is a problem that church and society can tackle and, in many cases, cure or control. In practice, our communities have the spiritual and psychological tools at hand. However, most do not have sufficient human and economic resources to use those tools effectively to help the people who desperately need them. The overwhelming majority of these resources are mainlined into a self-abortive policing effort that, by its very nature, cannot succeed.

Drug use and abuse clearly are serious problems. Yet a more intrusive and caustic moral illness results from the presence of drugs in the United States: greed. Greed is a much more subtle evil that the immaturity that leads to substance abuse. Like a cancer, it produces ancillary evils as destructive as its root. The people of the United States know by daily experience the destructive and havoc wreaked upon their lives by drug provides. This is the moral evil that must be erased.

I am painfully aware that, for many millions of U.S. citizens, the very mention of completely legalizing drugs sounds like a form of blasphemy. That is why I deliberately described current U.S. drug laws as false gods. They are blasphemy. They are the idolatrous Frankenstein that elected officials have created. They make the drug trade incredibly lucrative. Neither police action nor the appointment of drug czars will faze the drug lords. As a nation, the United States may well arrest and convict thousands of dealers. Law enforcement agencies can incarcerate them all at disastrous cost to the public. For the kind of economic profit illegal drugs provide, however, there will always be other losers that take their places. The kingpins will go on.

Moral leaders have no alternative but to choose between authentic morality, which produces good, and cosmetic morality, which merely looks good. Drug laws look good! But the tragic flaw of cosmetic morality, like all other forms of cosmetics, is that it produces no change of substance.

Proponents of cosmetic morality would rather look good than pay the tough, personal price of doing good. Authentic morality knows its limitations in the human condition and does all it can for the common good.

Some people are convinced that any and every problem can be solved with just a little more firepower. Yet the United States already has the third highest rate of incarceration in the world, following only South Africa and the Soviet Union. Continued enforcement of drug laws may make us number one. Funds needed for education and health care will be stripped away to maintain police agencies and prisons. U.S. liberties and judicial process are endangered because of a growing mania to win in court one way or another. Authentic moral leaders cannot afford the arrogant luxury of machismo, with its refusal to consider not “winning.” Winning, the case for drug abuse, is finding the direction and methods that provide the maximum amount of health and safety to the whole society without having a cure that is worse than the disease.

The fact is that the United States never had organized crime until Prohibition. Illegal (and thus very expensive) alcohol created a new economic market with hoodlums machine-gunning one another to death over profits. The percentage of U.S. citizens who drank hard liquor actually increased after alcohol was outlawed. When alcohol became legal again, the now-organized crime syndicate simply picked up the drug trade.

The standard argument against the legalization of drugs (all drugs, across the board) is: “It will make people, especially young people, think drugs are good.” The people involved in drug dealing and drug using already think they are good. They are acquiring the money or pleasure so highly prized by the U.S. culture. At this point, what is imperative for leaders in the United States to realize how young people think about good and bad. As a culture, U.S. youth do not equate illegal with immoral. Within their culture (and their experience of what adults have been doing with laws for the last generation), illegal simply means “harder to get,” “forbidden fruit,” or “adult toy.” The United States has some laws for the protection of human life. What does that teach young people about the law? Law may very well have been a teacher of good and bad for Saint Paul and Saint Thomas Aquinas, but it is hardly that for U.S. youth.

Another popular argument (and gross misconception) is that legal drugs will be too available. The reality is that U.S. grade schools and prisons are two of the hottest areas of drug trade. How much more available can the stuff become?

Legalizing all drugs in the United States would have one immediate and dramatic effect: it would render them cheap. In today’s market, a kilogram of illegal heroin or illegal cocaine has a street value of several million dollars. A kilogram of illegal marijuana has a street value of about a quarter million dollars. A kilogram of legal cocaine would be worth perhaps a couple hundred dollars and a kilogram of legal marijuana would be price with expensive tobacco. As long as drugs are illegal, the obscenity of the pricing structure will perdure. Legal drugs do not drug lords make. Legal drugs eradicate the reason for violence to control the trade.

There is no doubt that some people will abuse legal drugs; this happens with legal alcohol. It is also a sad human fact that some very sober and reasonable people drive cars recklessly; gamble away their hard earned money; use the gift of speech to spread slander, calumny, and gossip; and go on to do a great variety of inappropriate and sinful things. Human nature is, after all, wounded by the reality of sin. But lawmaking is not now, and never has been, the magic formula for goodness.

The problems, hurts, and difficulties that will definitely result from legalized drugs will be far, far less numerous and less destructive to the whole society than theft, bribery, violence, murder, mayhem, and self-degradation that are daily bread in the United States today. U.S. citizens must have the integrity and the painful honesty to keep in the forefront of their minds that they are not preventing addiction to crack or any other drug at this time. The current methods are not working. Humility, not arrogance, will help society find the best way to reach its goal, which is common good.